SPOTTED

SYNOPSIS

In “Spotted” the body of the performers is captured as an overflowing container. So full that it can not anymore digest, make sense or work through all the external information it receives. As well as all that seeps into it without any subjective control or awareness. Numb and leaking, on the verge of passing as still lives, the performers make us question topics that relate to us directly such as privacy, intimacy and isolation.

“Spotted” is a grimace of discontinuity; a glimpse of perfect individuality; a perversion where the achievers are in a state of spiritual absence; an investigation of animated objects unable to overcome their singular being; this separation or this very drive – the constituent execution or exhaustion.- Stefan Remen

The duet performance “Spotted” belongs belongs to the “Blind Spotting Performance Series “ which includes at this point; “Blind Spotting”, a performance with an original cast of 8 dancers which premiered at the Sophiensaile theater in Berlin spring 2014, “Blind Spotting- film version”, an artistic film created from the original 8 dancers performance, the duet performance “Spotted” which premiered in autumn 2014 during swedish Slingan tour, and the solo installation performance “In the Blind Spot” which premiered in spring 2015 at the Sophiensaele theater.

REVIEW

Breathtaking view of our times on exposure

“The Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, that resides in Berlin, works with phenomenal consistency. With lightness in execution, she builds to her account an unpleasant scene incorporating the gaze when working with space and time with a heart-stopping complexity evolving around themes such as identity, body and subject versus object (…)The compulsive vulnerability in the performance Spotted clings to the mind as an irritable yet great judgment of our time”.

Anna Angström SvD Kultur, 24/11/2014

With minimalistic precision

This constant flow of information gushing over the non shielded human being comes to a point of no return/ a turning point which creates physical and psychological stress when the exploitation works as if it is integrated on a personal level in the non shielded human being. The dansers Louise Dahl and Marie Ursin give such a strong and impressive performance that it´s hard to differentiate between the artistically crafted physical work and the bigger picture of the performance. It´s simply all existing there together as one.

Ingela Brovik, Danstidningen, 03/12/2014

And we wait: Andrew Edwards is both excruciatingly bored and enormously impressed by Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir’s inertia-ridden show.

The design of the work is brutally effective: a very beautiful kind of ugliness presented to us with notable precision…Throughout, I was never entertained, never distracted, but only ever trying to distract myself from the work. These are some of the work’s most impressive qualities, so well executed that my distractions failed time and again…what ensures SPOTTED is an engaging piece of work, and confirms that it contributes something new to this discourse, is the exceptional affective force it possesses. Not only does it articulate this quality of inertia, but it forces its audience into that state, or perhaps opens up a space in which that state, otherwise felt as an undercurrent or a dust, overwhelms you.

Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin, Wilderness Residencies project of the Nordic-Baltic contemporary dance community keðja, Co-Production by Slingan: Atalante Gothenburg, Dansstationen Malmö, MDT. Life Long Burning cultural programm of the European Union 2013-2018 and the Cullberg Ballet dance company in Stockholm.